From March 2-4, right-wing climate-denier group The Heartland Institute will host what it calls a ‘Climate Skeptics’ Conference. Heartland President Joseph Blast boasted that his conference would feature climate change deniers: “This is their chance to speak out.” The online poster for the conference declares, “Global Warming is not a crisis!”

Heartland’s environmental stance is completely out of the mainstream. The debate over human contribution to global warming is long over. Even as all three top GOP presidential candidates recently endorsed California’s effort to reduce auto greenhouse gas emissions, Heartland ridiculed the idea, calling California and its allies “environmental extremists.”

–James M. Taylor is editor of Heartland’s weekly Environment & Climate News and wrote an op-ed criticizing Gore’s “Assault On Reason” insisting that “global warming threats they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.”

RealClimate quips, “Normal scientific conferences have the goal of discussing ideas and data in order to advance scientific understanding. Not this one.”